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My old Lenovo T61p laptop died, so I bought a new identical old one. I transplanted my old disk into the new machine. Everything works perfectly, except for WiFi. I know the WiFi is good because the machine came with win xp, and under xp, the WiFi works perfectly.

I tried using device manager to "update driver," but it claims I have the latest driver. I ran windows update to get the latest, greatest everything. I unchecked in device manager "allow computer to turn off this device to save power."

What I observe is that the WiFi LED is on, but turns off momentarily every 5 secs or so. I have no idea what that means. Because the apps that tell me what incoming signals are present show nothing, this is not an access authentication problem. It seems to be some kind of driver issue.

One thing that bothers me is that in device manager there are 3 devices under "Other devices" with yellow ! signs: 2 of "Base System Device", and one "PCI Memory Controller". I don't recall seeing those issues on the old currently dead machine. At least the "PCI Memory Controller" one I noticed failed to be found at first boot in the new machine.

I should also clarify that I lied about the old and new machines being identical. The new machine does not have WWAN unlike the old, and it does have a fingerprint reader, which the old one lacked. Also, obviously the MAC address of the new WiFi card is different.

Another thing that bothers me is that Device Manager refers to the WiFi device as "Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN #2", although in the details section of "device description" it is just plain "Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN". This makes me think that the driver thinks the previous card is around somewhere and is confused about which one it is communicating with, or some such.

Can anyone cast some light on the meaning of these things, or what else I might be able to do to fix it?

Now having said that you could try this https://www.slimwareutilities.com/slimdrivers.php I use it on such occasions but please do be careful not to download anything else but the Slim Drivers it will access the manufacturers sites and that is the only way in my opinion to get the correct drivers - the Windows feature is pretty pathetic really.

Having said all this I always uninstall Slim Drivers when finished with it as it is a terrible nagger and will set itself up in msconfig as a start up item and to avoid that see point 9 from this Optimize Windows 7

Another thing that bothers me is that Device Manager refers to the WiFi device as "Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN #2", although in the details section of "device description" it is just plain "Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN". This makes me think that the driver thinks the previous card is around somewhere and is confused about which one it is communicating with, or some such.

What you need to do is to "Show hidden devices" in Dev Mgr and then remove all instances of the WiFi device. which will uninstall the drivers brought-over from your dead machine.

This should inspire Windows, when you try next "Scan for hardware changes" under Action to install a proper driver. If that doesn't work you'll need to make sure you've ID'ed the WiFi hardware correctly and then DL from the Intel site the correct driver for your board and your OS.

I suppose another thing to consider is to simply swap the WiFi chip from your defunct laptop into your new; thus the driver should work! It seems likely to me that WiFi board is probably still just fine.

@maxseven: Thanks. One thing I had not yet done, awaiting doing full disk image backups (now in progress), was to completely uninstall the driver, and see what happens as you suggest. I did not think of also looking for "hidden devices". I did also consider just transplanting the previous wifi card, but that's a fair amount of work. Those teeny connectors are a pain. That would be my last resort.

I have no doubt that the wifi card itself is fine, because it works just fine under win xp.

I did look at the Intel website for drivers, but for this device it says it will install Intel software, but will NOT update the drivers. That is probably I guess in deference to the laptop makers.

It has also occurred to me that it could be a BIOS issue. So, I probably should also flash BIOS to the latest.

The thing is, Windows already believes it has the right driver; the problem seems to be that it thinks there are 2 instances of the wifi card. Maybe if I can uninstall enough stuff, it will clear whatever is in the registry to make it think that.

Another thing I may do is try a fresh install of Win 7 (on a different disk!) and see if it works under those conditions. Also a lot of work.

Incidentally I bought TWO replacement machines with the exact same hardware, and the behavior is identical on both.

@ICIT2LOL: Thanks. I'm pretty sure there is a win 7 driver for that card because (a) windows claims I already have the right driver, and I doubt it would say that if the card were not supported under win 7, and (b) I had what I believe to be the identical wifi card in the old machine, and it worked perfectly under win 7.

I will have to check if I can find a driver on Lenovo's website. The latest install I did of win 7, though, I did not install anything directly from Lenovo because I found their software to be very buggy and phoning home all the time. I just installed whatever Windows Update wanted, which included many HW drivers from Lenovo. However, Lenovo does have their own "system update" software that parallels what windows update does, and it might find a better driver, or some missing stuff.

Another reason to believe that correct drivers do exist is that this machine when bought from Lenovo was licensed for both XP and Vista, although it only has XP, so that implies that Vista drivers must have existed, and I believe those would be the same as for win 7?

Great advice from Max and if you want to find the driver for the new network card see my ditty to find out detailed info on the card you have installed then get the driver from the manufacturers site (some machines come with several drivers for example for the Network for their boards and they may be Broadcomm, Atheros, or even Realtek so you need to make sure you are getting the right one) .
My pic is for example.
Using HW Info
PART A:
You can test the volts on the PSU with HW Info HWiNFO, HWiNFO32/64 - Download < download the right bit version and close the right hand window select Sensors and scroll down to the power section where you will see what the volts are doing see my pic. Now the section you want will be labelled - fpr example Asus boards usually have "Nuvoton" and Gigabyte boards "ITE" in any case the section you want will have Vbatt or VBAT in it (dead give away)
The original right hand window shows the machine running and is handy for that but for looking at the components in some detail close it and use the main left hand side panel
FOR OTHER COMPONENTS
PART B:
Open each small square with + in it on the section the components are in and then click on the individual component/s (it will highlight in blue) - in the right hand side will appear all sorts of details including brands speeds and other essential info that particular device. See pic for example.
Use PART B:

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